One morning in March 2021, a game warden in Helena, Montana, got a call with a request he knew might not end well for him: His boss and friend at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks had asked him to officially document the kill of a wolf. It seemed a pretty mundane request, except for one detail.
That hunter was Governor Greg Gianforte.
“I said I wanted nothing to do with it,” Director Justin Haukaluk recalled, letting out a barely audible chuckle.
Haukaluk now says his fears were justified: By the time the wolf incident was resolved, his bosses would pressure him to lie about the governor’s role, and he would be forced out of the department, he said in his first interview about the case with The New York Times, and he, too, would be leaving a job he said he loved.
The story of the governor, the wolf and the wardens made little noise when it first broke. Wolf hunting is legal and fairly common in Montana. Gianforte was recorded as the killer of an adult black wolf and was given a warning for not taking a required trapping class. A spokesman for the governor said Gianforte “immediately corrected his mistake” by taking the class. At the time, a department spokesman said the matter was handled as it would be for anyone.
But Mr. Gianforte, a Republican, is up for reelection this year, and some are uncomfortable with killing a once-protected animal. The treatment of wolves has come under scrutiny again after a Wyoming snowmobiler killed a wolf, taped its mouth shut and displayed it in a bar before killing it.
Officers involved in documenting Gianforte’s wolf, collared by trackers near Yellowstone National Park as No. 1155, now say the procedure was atypical: To avoid fining the governor, officers pressured them to document the governor’s hunting companion as the killer, rather than the governor himself, and were upset when the warden and superiors refused, the officers said.
Haukaluk said he sees this as an attempt at a “cover-up.”
“I don’t know if the governor had anything to do with this or knew about it,” he said, “but I said, ‘Nice try, but, no, you got what you deserve.’
Shawn Southard, a spokesman for the governor, would not directly address whether Gianforte had tried to push his friend into hunting wolves, instead dismissing the governor’s story as “a far-left fever dream spread by desperate supporters.”
Department spokesman Greg Lemon said the department would not comment on personnel matters but that employees carried out their duties “without political considerations or motivations.”
It is not illegal to kill radio-collared wolves that have wandered out of national parks onto private land. Approximately 250-300 wolves are intentionally killed each year in Montana. Some are killed as trophies, while others are killed by ranchers who blame them for killing livestock. Since wolves were reintroduced into the wild 30 years ago, Montana’s wolves have been tracked and studied to learn about their impact on the natural and man-made environment.
Before being shot, the wolf in question had been caught in a scaffold trap set on a 213,000-acre ranch outside Yellowstone owned by an heir to the Sinclair Oil fortune. It’s unclear who set the scaffold trap. Southard said Gianforte and a trapper friend set and monitored the traps according to regulations.
But one day in March 2021, as required by regulation, the Montana governor called the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks hotline to report that he had shot a trapped wolf.
The next morning, officers at the Sheriff’s Office received the message, and Dave Loewen, the Sheriff’s Office’s law enforcement chief, called Haukaluk with a request: Come to headquarters and report on the wolf incident. Oh, and the shooter, Loewen added, was Gov. Gianforte, who has a reputation for being hot-headed and was ordered to do 40 hours of community service and take 20 hours of anger management classes in 2017 for assaulting a reporter the night before he was elected to the House of Representatives.
Minutes later, Loewen said, police officials told him that Gianforte’s friend, outspoken trapper Matt Lumley, should get credit for the catch. Loewen called Haukaluk to relay the instructions. The problem was that Gianforte’s name was already in the database as a trapper.
“I was able to read between the lines,” Haukaluk recalled, “and I said, ‘Whoever you’re talking to over there better get your story straight, because Gianforte reported it as the trapper of record.'”
“The whole thing just felt bad,” he said.
When the director refused to accompany him, Loewen and his deputy went to the director’s office, where Lumley was sitting at a conference table. Loewen was undeterred in his insistence that the governor was responsible for the kill. His boss backed down, conceding that the governor was responsible for the kill, and issued a public warning to Loewen for killing the wolf without taking the required trapping course.
From that point on, things only got worse for Loewen. Haukaluk said rumors began to circulate, which Loewen confirmed, about inappropriate relationships with employees in other departments. After those rumors were denied, Loewen was accused of fostering a hostile work environment and placed on administrative leave in July 2022, a charge he vigorously denies.
According to a letter obtained by The New York Times outlining the terms of Loewen’s departure, after 22 years with the department, he will be terminated with $150,000 pay by October 2022. The state will pay for the settlement. In return, Loewen promised not to sue for further damages or to disparage his former employer. The state also promised not to disparage Loewen.
With that non-disparagement clause in mind, Loewen acknowledged the series of events that led to the warning to the governor but made no further comment.
“Yes, all of that happened,” he said of Haukaluk’s timeline.
Southard, the governor’s spokesman, said he understood the confusion about who was responsible for trapping the wolves. Both Gianforte and Lumley set the traps, and tags on the traps that captured the wolves identified them as the owners, he said.
“The Governor has been trapping for nearly 50 years,” Southard said, “and prior to trapping wolves in 2021, the Governor had been working to trap wolves for the past five years, primarily through hunting and more recently through trapping.”
A spokesman for the governor blamed the flaring up of the wolf issue on “former state employees who may be harboring a grudge.” Though Loewen’s terms of firing state employees state that “neither party may blame the other,” Southard said former employees are harboring grudges because “they may be held accountable for breaking the law or failing to follow workplace policies.”
Loewen declined to comment on the governor’s response. Haukaluk said he had no complaints and had never been accused of violating any law or workplace rules when he left the agency in January to become a field consultant for the Montana Federation of Public Employees.
To the state’s wolf conservationists, the governor’s crime wasn’t poor teaching, but the potential cruelty of the kills.
Wolves caught in traps suffer so much that they often bite off their own legs. Montana trapping regulations state that trappers “must immediately kill any uncollared wolf” caught in a trap, and trappers must check their trap lines every 48 hours. The same regulations advise trappers “may release a collared wolf if it is not injured.” Although it is permitted to kill collared animals, many hunters avoid doing so out of respect for the researchers studying them.
The Montana Legislature was in session in Helena, the state capital, at the time Gianforte killed the wolf, and wolf experts question whether the governor could have made the 177-mile journey to set a trap and then shoot the wolf quickly enough to meet regulations that would minimize suffering.
“That’s just not realistic,” said Nathan Varley, a Yellowstone Wolf Tracker who has led wolf-watching tours for 18 years, adding that wolves are unpopular in Montana, but people love them, so shooting a trapped wolf would be a bad look. It would be ugly.”
Southard retorted.
“The far-left has sowed the seeds of rumours about the harvest,” he said.
As for Gianforte’s initial warning, the person who organized the course the governor didn’t take said the violation was serious. “Hunters who were improperly licensed should have been heavily fined or had their licenses revoked,” said Thomas Baumeister, now with the Montana chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
“There’s a lot of discretion in enforcement, and it’s rarely black and white,” Baumeister said. But he was more decisive about the collared wolves just outside Yellowstone. “In this case, it’s black and white,” he said.
